Internationally award-winning modern re-telling of an ancient myth.
A lad lives half way up a historic hill.
A teenager is on a road trip to the city in a stolen car.
A boy is driving a chariot, pulling the sun across the sky.
A story about the son of the god of the sun, HELIOS transplants the Ancient Greek tale into a modern-day myth wound round the the winding roads of rural England and into the everyday living of a towering city. A story about life, and about the invisible monuments we build to it.
An intimate tale made to be told in smaller rooms, HELIOS is a collective experience which invites the audience to be part of the story. Told by a single storyteller, with a cinematic score, HELIOS asks us to invest in the micro and the macro – the power of the sun, and the power of the small things which we carve our lives out of.
It’s a story about growing up, about the pride of young boys, and how we define our worlds.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“A much needed reminder of the irresistible power of stories to unite us’” – THE LIST
“Very cleverly involves the audience in an hour in which past and present, the ancient and the contemporary, lightness and darkness mingle” – The Guardian
Awards
Lustrum Award, Summerhall 2023
Best Theatre (Weekly), Adelaide Fringe 2024
Credits
Created by Wright & Grainger
Words by Alexander Wright
Music by Phil Grainger
Performed by Jamie MacDowell.
Alexander Wright & Phil Grainger have been making theatre together since 2016’s ORPHEUS, which has now played well over 500 shows across three continents.
Jamie MacDowell
Jamie MacDowell is an Australian storyteller, who has sold out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London Southbank, Glastonbury Music Festival, Zermatt Unplugged (Switzerland), Prague Fringe Festival, South African National Arts Festival, Hong Kong Underbelly Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, and in theatres and basement bars throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.His passion for storytelling and language means that his audiences feel included in his performances and no two shows are the same.
Wright & Grainger
Wright & Grainger are an internationally acclaimed, multi award-winning pair of pals from rural North Yorkshire in the UK. Their work is wound from spoken word and live music playing across the world between festivals, tents, cafes, pubs, lanes, fields, railway arches, gardens, boats and the occasional theatre. Their shows ORPHEUS, EURYDICE, HELIOS and THE GODS THE GODS THE GODS have played thousands of times around the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Bali and New York including The Sydney Opera House, The Festival Of Colour, Theatr Clwyd and Soho Boulevard.
Tom Oliver Productions
Tom Oliver Productions is a multi-pronged, award-winning entertainment group transforming dreams into reality from Brisbane, Australia. Highlights include: Founding and producing the multi-million dollar Wynnum Fringe Festival in Brisbane’s Bayside (which in 4 years has grown by 300%), winning the Gold Matilda Award for outstanding service to Entertainment & The Arts in Queensland, the outdoor music concert Rock The Bay, championing early career and established creative workers globally, managing UK based Wright & Grainger’s award-winning productions in Australia, creating the circus-variety show Rhonda’s After Party with Rhonda Burchmore OAM, the inaugural Bay Pride Fair Day, and the current restoration and management of The Augathella Spiegeltent.
Wilder Times
Wilder Times sees the return of a series of Shoalhaven landscape paintings by Arthur Boyd to Bundanon for the first time since their creation in 1984 as a commission for the new Arts Centre Melbourne.
The exhibition also brings together over 60 works by seminal Australian artists from the same time Boyd created this momentous body of work. The exhibition provides a window into a period of cultural dynamism in Australia, when ideas of landscape, land ownership and environmental protection were actively interrogated.
